A Lazy Blogger's Final Thoughts

I've been a terrible blogger for the second half of my trip. Chasing this year was not easy. It was an exercise in futility, frustration and patience. We drove all over The Plains; from Bismarck, North Dakota to San Antonio, Texas. We went to bed late and woke up early. All to try and catch that elusive storm. We watched storms evaporate before our eyes.  We were foiled nearly every step of the way. Either the moisture was too low. Or there was no flow. Or it was too cloudy (too cloudy for storms! seems wrong, doesn't it?). Or too hot. Or too cold. Whatever the reason was, this year was HARD.

We also had challenges that had nothing to do with weather. Dog challenges, sleep challenges, food challenges, various aches and pains, forgetting stuff (like my glasses) in hotels, spiders in hotel rooms, lack of air conditioning, etc. You name it, we struggled with it. We snapped at each other, we bitched and moaned, and our attitudes sucked.

But if you asked any of us where they would rather be, I would bet money that the answer was exactly where we were (albeit, with storms). On a particularly frustrating day, Keith overheard me saying, "This sucks! I don't know how much more I can take!" He asked me later on what I planned to do about that and if I was planning to leave early. My answer was "Of course not! What if I leave early and that's when something happens?" Because you never know what can happen.

Sometimes storm chasing isn't about the storms at all; it is about the people that you meet along the way. In Salina, Kansas, we met a Polarity Therapist who works with animals. He came to our hotel room and worked with Porthos' bum leg. I've never seen that stressed out boy so relaxed. After he left, Porthos got up and played with Trego. In Seymour, Texas, we met Sheriff Bob Hensen. Sheriff Bob told us all about the tornadoes he remembers from growing up in Texas, how he drank red tank (pond) water and slept in the dirt and ate food from the chuck wagon on his family's property. He had kind eyes and as soon as he drove away, I wished I had grabbed my camera and taken his picture.

When I created this blog four years ago as a way of keeping my friends and family up to date on my chasing adventures, I thought I was being clever by calling it "There's No Place Like Home."  I was scared of tornadoes and other natural disasters. I was scared of what I might see. It was a play on the Wizard of Oz that made sense to me.

It no longer makes sense. I love home. I love being close to my family. I love my husband and my dog. And holy crap, I love my bed. But now I say, there's no place like the plains. There's no place like South Dakota, Kansas, Texas, Oklahoma. There's no place on earth that rivals the beauty of the plains during a storm. Last year I fell in love with South Dakota. This year I left of piece of myself there. Coming home, back to the noise and congestion of NYC, makes me long for quiet of the plains. No matter what life brings me, kids, family, money issues, I will do whatever I can to make sure that I can go on my chasing adventures every year. It rejuvenates and revitalizes me. I love it with every fiber of my being.

Samara Fogel Photography - Storm Chasing 2012 Gallery

Day 6: Tornadoes after Dark

After such a shitty week of driving all over the place, we decided to catch up on some sleep and get a late start back to Norman to drop Keith off and pick Emily up. There was a Day 2 general thunder risk so we figured that if we saw something along the way, we would chase it, but we were not hopeful.

We were in two rooms that night so the next morning Keith calls Dave around 9:30 to say that we needed to leave ASAP because the setup for southwestern Kansas looked promising. I don't think we've ever gotten up and out so quickly. 

I am sure glad that we did. 

I was driving and I hauled ass from Des Moines to Russell, KS. As we were heading west into Russell on I-70, we could see the sharp edges of the anvil for storms that were already in progress. Almost immediately after pulling off of I-70 we saw a small tornadic circulation/gustnado. 

We blasted back west on I-70 a few exits and saw a bit more low level rotation. The storm was pretty high based and we weren't hopeful that it would produce. We waited on it a bit, but then decided to target the southern storm in the line of 3 isolated supercells that was down near La Crosse, KS because there was already a confirmed tornado in progress. I drove south, and as we were driving, we noticed that the middle storm looked interesting, so we pulled off onto a dirt road to take a closer look. 

And there it was. Our first tornado of the trip!  YAY!!!!

We decided to continue south toward our target and watched the tornado rope out behind us. 

Almost as soon as we stopped just outside of Lacrosse, we spotted a funnel. That funnel quickly became a cone tornado as it became truly dark. I was shooting at anything from 12,000 to 25,000 ISO and using lightning as a flash in order to get any images at all. 

Just before we left the storm, it fattened up into a big, fat, cone. 

At that point, hail started falling out of the anvil so we decided to head east out of La Crosse. The lightning was pretty intense and all of a sudden, in the distance, we were able to see the tornado still in progress! So we stopped again and got out of the car to take pictures and video of the tornado roping out. 

We were then lucky enough to see two tornadoes in progress at the same time; the original La Crosse tornado and then a small, skinny ropy thing from the new meso area. 

All in all, we saw six tornadoes. The main La Crosse Tornado lasted 54 minutes long. We were with it almost its entire lifespan. It was incredible and exhilirating. I wish the tornadoes had occured even 40 minutes earlier. I'm not proud of the photos that I took, though I'm happy to have anything at all. 

It was an incredible end to a difficult week 1 of chasing. We traveled a lot of miles for very little reward. 

View Storm Chasing 2012 Week 1 in a larger map

This made it all worthwhile. 

Days 2 - 5: You Never Know

After our first day of chasing we headed up north to position into North Dakota. We took two travel days and positioned ourselves in the Bismarck area. Nothing happened in Bismarck other than leaving my glasses in the hotel and needing them shipped back to Norman. Sigh.

 We dropped south, saw a pretty lightning show, and spent the night in Aberdeen, South Dakota. From Aberdeen we continued to drop south and headed east into Iowa near Sioux City.

From there we chased a small storm northeast from Nebraska into Iowa. We were in decent position initially, but because we had to cross the Missouri River, we  didn't have a good road option and let the storm get out in front of us. The storm motion was moving northeast at around 45-50 miles per hour and we just couldn't catch up with it, so we let it go.

The Day 2 Convective Outlook showed a moderate probability of severe in Northern Wisconsin and Minnesota. We hemmed and hawed over it and decided that since we had seen a big fat nothing, we needed to try. Because you never know what the atmosphere will produce. We headed into Des Moines to start to position for our trek up north.

The only thing that we saw in Minnesota and Wisconsin was a messy storm that produced quite a bit of lightning. Minnesota is pretty.

By this point we were all done. Over it. Tired of driving a jillion miles everyday to see a thunderstorm. Morale was pretty low in the car.

We headed back to Des Moines and spent the night and with a plan to drive back to Norman the next day.

...And it begins again

I started my annual chase trip with the normal amount of anxiety. Anxiety about leaving my husband, anxiety about leaving my dog, anxiety about sitting in a car for two weeks straight, and anxiety about being tough enough to handle the chase.

Within minutes of starting our first chase on Saturday, the rest ceased to matter for a little while.

The storms weren't anything to write home about. They were weak, non-tornadic, blobs. It didn't seem that there would be any sign of the big old supercells (and hopefully tornadoes) that we drove halfway across the country for. I didn't care. I was in the plains. I was somewhere that people and buildings weren't closing in on me. I could breathe the air and not worry about what carcinogenic fumes I was inhaling. All of my stress seemed to melt away.

We started off in Norman, Oklahoma around 2pm and began to head west. We stopped for lunch in Seiling, OK and decided to chase a little cell southwest of Elk City. It wasn't anything special, but I did get some pretty mammatus clouds. I'm pretty sure that's the first time I've ever seen them.

We decided that the cell at the southern end of the line looked a little healthier so we started heading in that direction.

We stopped to take a structure shot as the storm was passing over a wind farm with the sun setting behind it.

Since this storm had a little more umph than the previous one, we decided to stay on it. We turned down a dirt road that had farm fields on either side, and an abandoned house a bit down the road. As we turned onto the road I noticed that the sun was setting and you could see it through the core of the storm.

We decided to re-position to get some more wide angle structure shots of what had surprisingly become a supercell. We stood up on a hill, with Elk City below us and watched the storm come in as the sun was setting. For awhile there was a pretty good wall cloud on the storm, but no one thought it would produce a tornado. 

Once it became too dark to shoot anymore, we called the chase and headed into Elk City for dinner. We core of the storm was between us and there was larger hail than we anticipated. Nothing huge, but it was LOUD as it was hitting the roof of the car.